The present invention relates to the field of information technology and more particularly, systems and techniques that relate to deploying a software application.
Enterprise application software may be software used by an organization, such as a business, to perform one or more functions or operations associated with the organization. For example, a business may use enterprise application software, such as Documentum® provided by EMC2®, to organize or manage content associated with the business's operations. Services provided by enterprise application software may be on-demand or online tools such as online payment processing, an interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, enterprise content management, internet technology (IT) service management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, business intelligence, project management, collaboration, human resource management, manufacturing, enterprise application integration, and enterprise forms automation.
Enterprise application software may be hosted by host applications which may be implemented on one or more servers, client machines, or other network resources. Thus, an enterprise application may be deployed to multiple host applications which may each be used to execute an instance of the enterprise application and provide services associated with the enterprise application. The host applications may each be implemented or associated with a node in a communications network, such as the Internet. Thus, a host application may be associated with and represented as a network node in a communications network. A node may be a physical network node, such as a host computer or client machine, which may be identified by an Internet protocol (IP) address.
Changes may occur in the environment in which the software application is deployed. Thus, software or hardware associated with a software application or host application may change due to a patch or an upgrade. One or more changes to the environment in which a software application has been deployed may cause errors in the execution or functionality of the software application.
Conventional methods and systems for deploying software over a network remain limited because they do not provide a way to identify or trouble shoot a change which may have caused an error in the execution of a software application.